Isnare is a popular article distribution site that allows you to syndicate your article to a number of article directories. Having tried to log on today, it appears that the Isnare website is down and I won’t be holding my breath that it will return at any point soon.

A lot of people have experienced huge problems with Isnare over the past few months and it appears from all the complaints on forums and blogs that their customer service is non-existent.

What’s worse – I now cannot even access the site. Is the site down for good? Well we’ll have to see, but I would strongly recommend that people do not buy any further distribution credits on Isnare until they can demonstrate that they are actually interested in providing a service.

If you’re looking to distribute unique articles, I’d recommend trying one of the various other services instead which allow you to spin your article and make it unique – Article Ranks and Unique Article Wizard are two tried and tested services that seem to get good results.

I was inspired to write this post after reading a forum question where someone was asking about the value of multiple links from the same domain.

The short answer to this question is that the best strategy to adopt is to gain one link from each domain rather than multiple links from the same domain. It is not uncommon to acquire multiple links from the same domain, especially if you have a link on a blogroll. But the value of these additional links to the same URL is greatly diminished.

From an SEO point of view, if you are submitting articles to gain backlinks, it makes sense to submit a URL only once to each article directory. Once you’ve done this, you will either need to start promoting your deep links or move on to the next directory. This is a good idea anyway, because you don’t want all of your links pointing to your home page.

To gain the most out of link building, you need to find multiple domains to submit your link to or request a link from. If you are doing article submissions, this means finding a huge list of directories to submit to. You can automate this by spinning the article for submission to multiple directories, although you must do this with an effective article rewriter and your spinned articles must make sense. Once you’ve spun the article, you can then submit the article to hundreds of directories. You can either use some automated software to do this or simply outsource this task for a few dollars.

Don’t be too concerned if you gain multiple links from the same domain. Google will simply discount the additional links rather than view you as a spammer since there are legitimate reasons to gain multiple backlinks from one domain. All I am saying here is that it’s not worth chasing additional backlinks to the same URL from the same root domain.

If you have more than one link to the same URL on a web page, Google will discount the second link. This is important to know because you don’t want your second link discounted if you are using your preferred anchor text for this link. It makes sense for Google to discount these links otherwise it would be quite easy to spam a website (and there’s enough of that already) with multiple links to the same URL.

When you’re building links for your website, you need to bear in mind that some sites use the nofollow attribute for external links. The nofollow attribute was introduced by Google about four years ago. Its purpose is to prevent any Pagerank from being passed to the site that is being linked to. This attribute was introduced in order to combat spam and the manipulation of Google’s algorithm.

Many social media sites and popular bloggers now routinely use the nofollow attribute. It’s not particularly helpful to have a nofollow link from an SEO perspective, so the only motive for having a nofollow link is to drive traffic to your site. As the main focus of our efforts is to increase our rankings in the search engines, I’d suggest avoiding nofollow links altogether.

A quick and easy way to spot a nofollow link is to download the NoDoFollow plugin for Firefox. Being able to visually see the highlighted nofollow links on the page is a great timesaver. You will note if you are using this plugin that my link to Wikipedia in the first paragraph is a followed link, whereas my second link to the Firefox plugin contains the nofollow attribute.

If you want to extract the link juice from a page, make sure that the link you wish to obtain will be a dofollow link. This way, you can be sure that it will help you achieve the rankings you desire for your chosen keyword(s).

Edit: Ironic, isn’t it, that this page which explains that nofollow links are no good for SEO, attracts the vast majority of the spam comments, which a) don’t get approved and b) if they were approved, would be nofollow.

Turning off comments now…damned spammers.

One of the best ways to figure out which link building methods work is to experiment for yourself. Many people will tell you that one particular method works well or doesn’t work at all, but it’s important to figure this out for yourself as a lot of what is written about SEO is opinion rather than fact.

The best way to conduct an experiment is to create a completely clean page or site that doesn’t have any existing inbound links. You can create a page for free by using a service like Hubpages or Squidoo, but to maintain complete control over your content it is a good idea to go down the self-hosted route.

The experiment would ideally target a keyword which has some competition but which would be easy to rank well for with a small amount of effort. You really want to be able to target a top 10 spot in the search engines, so anything too competitive will be a waste of time. Before conducting the experiment, do some keyword research to find the best keywords to target.

For me, the most crucial part of the experiment is to target one particular link building technique at a time. Where people tend to go wrong is that they use several different link building techniques at once and it can be difficult to determine which technique is effective and which one is a dud.

Techniques I use for link building experiments include blog commenting, article submission and blog reviews. These are typically low level forms of link building which means that the value of each link can be quite low but once you start to build a volume of such links you should start to get an idea about whether they are working or not.

Experiments like this can take some time so I would expect to conduct the experiment over a period of at least 3-6 months before I expect to see the results, although sometimes if the method is successful you can usually see results a lot quicker than this. I have just started my first experiment using this domain and will revisit this post to provide an update on how the experiment went at a later date.

Link building should be done with a lot of care and attention. Before you even start link building, think about which types of link you wish to acquire and plan a strategy for building these links steadily over a long period of time.

The problem with many webmasters is that they are too eager to grab as many inbound links as they can without paying any attention to the quality of these links as well as the rate at which they acquire these links. I’ve been there and done that and the outcome was that I crashed and burned. There’s no definitive answer about the number of links to acquire each week/month, but for a new site I typically try to generate only a handful of links in the first month then gradually increase the velocity of my link acquisition so that it looks like my site is naturally growing in popularity.

It’s entirely possible to gain 100 links in a day and there are perfectly valid reasons why a site may suddenly gain a lot of backlinks in a single day. But if you are building links over a considerable period of time, it’s undesireable to hunt down too many links too quickly because you tend to lose the focus on quality.

Quality links are typically found in content and on sites that have a good backlink profile. These are the best types of link to acquire and also the hardest. As tempting as it is to go for a large volume of links, it can also pay dividends to slow down your link building campaign at times to find good quality sites to obtain a backlink from. If you consider that one quality link can equal 100 or even 1000 low quality links, you can see why it makes sense to factor these quality links into your strategy for building links to your site.

Quality links are not always difficult to acquire, but they can take a considerable amount of effort. Seek out websites where you would desire a backlink and figure out what to offer them to get them to link to your site. It could be a donation to their cause, a useful tool, a high quality article or some other service which may prove useful to them or their readers. You could even gain a quality link through commenting on blogs if you are persistent enough and you take the time to leave considered, intelligent comments.

I’m not denying that volume is also an important factor here. I’m merely saying it shouldn’t be your only goal. Obtaining links on many different sites with different IP addresses is a great way to approach link building, but it’s good to mix things up and add some real quality into the mix.

Now that you know how to make a blog comment, you will need to find blogs to comment on.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to use this search string in Google. Replace the word “keyword” at the start of the string with the keyword you wish to rank for.

This will enable you to find all the blogs which use the KeywordLuv Wordpress plugin. In a nutshell, this allows people to place comments on the blog and these comments are followed by the search engines (i.e. they pass value to your page).

What you need to avoid are blogs where all of the comments are “nofollow” because this does not pass any value to the page you are linking to.

Another thing you can do to find “dofollow” blogs is to enter this search string in Google.

Having said this, the easiest methods are not always the most effective. Any blog that is featured on a list of “dofollow” blogs to comment on is likely to have a large number of comments.

If you find a blog post with over 100 comments, move on to the next blog. Some blogs suffer from comment spam and you’ll want to avoid these because a backlink from these blogs will not pass any real value to your site, even if the page on the blog has a high PageRank.

One of the easiest ways to build backlinks is through commenting on blogs. This method is very popular because it’s free and accessible to everyone. Many blog owners typically invite people to comment on their posts and this allows you the opportunity to gain a backlink to your site.

Although it sounds easy, making the best use of this opportunity requires a bit more research than simply finding random blogs to comment on.

My first rule for commenting on blogs is to make sure that the comment relates to the topic being discussed. Random comments or ones that do not add to the discussion are likely to be deleted by the blog’s owner. Worse still, your comment could be reported as spam which means that you may be prevented from posting comments on other blogs. No blog owner wants to have spam on their blog, myself included.

My second rule for commenting on blogs is to find blogs that relate to my niche. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, it’s much quicker and easier to comment on a subject I am familiar with. Also, I gain a backlink from a relevant page, which will help my page to rank better than if it were to come from a completed unrelated page.

When commenting on a blog, there are typically several fields you will need to fill in. One of these fields is the name field. This field is where you can put your anchor text and this can be the keyword(s) you wish to rank for. Bear in mind, however, that not all blog owners will appreciate you putting some anchor text in the name field and it may result in your comment being deleted altogether. If there are other comments on the page, check whether the blog owner has allowed them to use keywords in the name field. If in doubt, use your real name (or a fictitious name).

Now that you know how to comment on blogs, you need to know where to find blogs which allow dofollow comments.